FWIW, this article suggests the static software scheduling you are describing was introduced in Kepler, so it's probably at least not entirely new in Volta:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-r...

> NVIDIA has replaced Fermi’s complex scheduler with a far simpler scheduler that still uses scoreboarding and other methods for inter-warp scheduling, but moves the scheduling of instructions in a warp into NVIDIA’s compiler. In essence it’s a return to static scheduling

and I think this is describing more or less the same thing in Maxwell: https://github.com/NervanaSystems/maxas/wiki/Control-Codes